Normal
by silvaaeterna
Summary: An eight year old boy should not have a roommate that isn't blood-related, or whose real name he doesn't even know, but this is Matt's life now. Like it or not, he's stuck with Mello – and right now, he definitely doesn't like it. Oneshot.


**Summary: **An eight year old boy should not have a roommate that isn't blood-related, or whose real name he doesn't even know, but this is Matt's life now. Like it or not, he's stuck with Mello – and right now, he definitely doesn't like it. Oneshot.

**Disclaimer:** Don't own Death Note in the slightest.

**Warning:** This is rated T for language. Matt and Mello have severe potty mouths, even at age eight. :3

**A/N:** Written for a contest on The Muse Bunny, with the prompt of "eraser shavings all over my bed." I can't win, of course, since I'm actually one of the judges, so I just did this for fun (and at the VERY last minute). Enjoy the Wammy's-era fluff! ;D

***

**Normal**

I had been so, _so_ close – I could already hear her voice, hear her crying out to me. I could see the pink frills of her dress and the glint of light shining off her crown. But I _failed_. At the last second, I got caught up in the moment and lost my footing. I fell off that last ledge, and before I even hit the ground I could hear that damned tune telling me I was dead.

Mario could have done it – he could have saved Peach. But I just _had _to be Luigi. How pathetic is it that, even in my dreams, I'm always Luigi?

I rolled over, sighing in defeat, and glanced at the clock. Four in the morning – two hours left to possibly dream about something nice for once. Two hours until...

"_Damn it all!_" growled a low voice above me.

Just two hours until I needed to wake up for the math test, which my roommate was apparently _still _studying for. He was always studying, at least when he wasn't taking a break to bully the other kids, or to steal a candy bar, or to tell me how stupid I am for playing video games all the time... Didn't this guy ever sleep?

He mumbled something else, and my sleepy brain realized that the room didn't look as dark as it should at four a.m. He obviously had a light on up there to study by, and though it wasn't obnoxiously bright, it was just one more nuisance from someone who'd annoyed me almost nonstop since they brought me here. I wasn't even used to sleeping in my new bed yet, but he just had to go and make it even _harder_ for me to get any sleep.

I yanked my blanket further up, intending to cover my head and ignore him, but the quick move threw a bunch of, well, _somethings_ right into my face. I practically jumped out from under the covers, which only resulted in me getting the sheet twisted up around my arm, and brushed the stuff madly off my face. My first thought was that they were bugs (reminiscent of the first shit-hole orphanage they sent me to), but they felt more like bits of dirt. Feeling around, I discovered that the whole right side of my bed was littered with the stuff.

"...The hell doesn't this _work?_" came another frustrated muttering from the top bunk. I leaned out to the right as far as I could, wondering if I'd be able to see what he was doing up there. I heard a sweeping noise, and suddenly there was more of the mysterious dirt falling on my head.

I brushed the stuff off my face – _again_ – and sat there for about thirty seconds just seething. An eight year old boy should not have a roommate that isn't blood-related, or whose real name he doesn't even know.

But then, an eight year old boy is not supposed to get visits from the police in the middle of the night either. He's not supposed to get woken up from pleasant, _normal_ dreams to be told his parents are dead. He's not supposed to get taken from his house and his friends and his school and shipped off to some ratty institution just to live off crappier food than his old school ever served. And after all that, he shouldn't have to get moved around from place to place again and again (even if he really did hate that first place and was glad to leave it). He shouldn't be thrown into some interrogation-like interview with some old man who's convinced he's a genius. How the hell is he supposed to deal with something like that? How is he supposed to live up to some crazy genius standard now, when he's still too shocked and jaded to function?

But no, I – _he_ – could deal with all of that. He could sit by himself somewhere and play his gameboy and forget. He could block out the rest and focus on fantasy, if only for a few minutes at a time. He could _survive_.

The only thing he couldn't handle – the one thing that finally got to him, the _one last straw_ that broke the camel's back – was getting stuck rooming with Mello.

Of course, it wasn't until a week later, at four a.m., with hardly three hours' sleep and a test in three more, that Mello finally managed to break this boy of his quiet demeanor.

Or maybe my brain just wasn't functioning properly at this hour, whichever.

I tossed my blanket off, unwrapped the troublesome sheet from around my arm, and scooted out of bed. The hard wooden floor was cold on my bare feet, but I didn't care. I was _mad_ – for the first time since this upheaval of my life had begun, I was actually really upset about something, and I sure as hell wasn't going to sit there in bed and pretend otherwise.

I grabbed onto the sides of the little ladder at my bedside, not caring how much noise I made, and climbed up the first few rungs until I'd raised my sour face up high enough for Mello to see it.

"The hell do _you_ want?" he snarled, scratching and scribbling like mad in a spiral notebook and not even sparing a glance for me. My face, futile as it was, only turned more sour as I scowled and narrowed my eyes like never before. I wondered if this was what other kids felt like before they threw temper tantrums.

"Turn off the light," I snapped, pointing indignantly at the little lamp clamped onto the headboard, "and go to fucking_ sleep_ for once!"

The scowl disappeared in an instant, and I slapped my pointing hand over my mouth. Mello was always cussing, so even after just a week he'd gotten me doing it too, but this was the first time that anything worse than 'damn' had actually slipped out of my mouth. He actually looked at me now (damn him!), pencil pausing in his hand and a weird sort of surprise coming over his girly features.

"What the fuck did you just say to me, you little shit?" he said slowly, obviously trying hard to keep his voice down. Even so, I could still hear that weird accent of his. I'd never had the nerve to ask where he was from. The accent itself wasn't too strong, but then, I supposed he'd been living here in England long enough for it to have faded some. He'd obviously lived here long enough to gather a reputation, and for every last kid in the house to know who he was, and to learn English if he hadn't known it already...

"Well, you..," I stuttered, sure that I was red in the face, spoiling any chance of showing how angry I was. I knew he'd laugh at me to know that I'd never cussed like that out loud before, but I could only hope he wouldn't figure it out. "You're keeping me up, so put that stuff away and go to sleep already."

"I'm studying, idiot," he growled, reaching under the blankets piled up next to him and pulling out one of the chocolate bars he was always pilfering from the kitchen. Jeez, this kid even ate like a girl.

"Well _duh_, I can see that," I said, rolling my eyes and climbing further up the ladder, "but you've been studying since class ended yesterday! Enough already!"

"Says the dumb-ass who didn't study at all." He took the candy in his teeth, breaking off a chunk of it with a loud crack before putting the bar back down. High enough now, I pulled myself onto his bed. He watched me warily out of the corner of his eye, but I was used to those paranoid looks by now, so it didn't really bother me.

"What difference would one test make?" I muttered, sitting cross-legged in front of him. His pile of textbooks and notes separated us by more than a foot. "Don't you have the highest grades in this place anyway?"

"I _did_," he said, still chewing on his chocolate, "until that albino freak Near passed me up, even though he's always playing with fucking toys and doesn't study even half as much as I do..." I wrinkled up my nose – I could see every bit of the melting brown goo in his mouth when he talked. Gross.

"Close enough..." He turned up blazing eyes at me, as if he thought he could set me on fire just by glaring hard enough, but when that plan failed he chucked an eraser at me instead.

"There is no _close enough_, you durak!" he fumed. "You're either number one around here or you're nothing, not that a slacker like you gives a damn anyway."

"And then what, Mello?" I shot back, the anger coming back full force again. "What the hell's the point in being the world's best orphan, huh?"

"The best gets to be L someday!" he said, snatching up his pencil again. "Why the fuck do you think I study so damn hard, for_ fun?!_"

"Out of all the kids here, only one of us can be L, right? And if that Near kid is beating you so easily, all this work you're doing is pretty pointless..."

"He_ won't _beat me," Mello deadpanned, scribbling out what I had to assume was a math problem. "And it's not pointless, Matt. This is important to me, okay?"

I sat quietly for a minute, just watching him work out the problem, his eyebrows scrunched together in concentration. He really had to be serious about this, because he'd never used my name before – well, it wasn't really my name, just a fake name like they gave all the kids here, but it was a big change from him always calling me 'idiot' or 'moron' or those weird things that I was sure were cuss words from his native language.

"Damn it!" he cursed under his breath, throwing his pencil down at the nearest textbook. "Why the hell can't I get this right?"

I picked up his calculator, still sitting unused by his knee, and turned it over in my hands. Even if he was a jerk and a bully and treated me like scum and looked like a girl (seriously, who cut his hair?), you had to admit that he did try really hard with his schoolwork. Mom always told me to look for the good in people, after all, and to help them when I could. If nothing else, Mello was dedicated to this, and that was a good thing, right? And even someone like him deserved a break every once in a while...

"I could probably fix this for you," I said, turning on the calculator and experimentally trying out a few of the built-in functions. He looked up weirdly at me.

"It's not broken."

"I mean... I could rig it so it would solve some of those equations for you," I explained, "or at least store some formulas, so you wouldn't have to waste time memorizing..."

"There's no way," he mumbled. "Those models were specially designed to prevent stuff like that, that's why we use them here..."

"We've got some time before the test still, I bet I could do it," I told him, a proud smile sneaking onto my face. "I'm pretty good with technical stuff, you know."

"Hmmph, so that's why they let you keep those damn video games," he scoffed, picking up his discarded pencil again. "Now gimme back that eraser, because I've only got 'til seven to get this shit figured out."

"You're the one who threw it in the first place," I grumbled, picking up the little piece of rubber from my lap (where it had landed some minutes ago) and tossing it back to him.

"Yeah, because you were annoying me, and you still are," he spat, glaring at me for a second before manically erasing the abused notebook paper. "I'm not cheating, so go the hell back to sleep and let me study."

"I _can't,_" I insisted, setting the calculator on top of one of the open textbooks.

"Why not?" he asked, though he seemed rather disinterested in what my answer might be. I sighed and crossed my arms over my chest, watching with narrowed eyes as he swept his hand across the paper, sending little bits flying off into the air.

"Because you're getting eraser shavings all over my bed!" I exclaimed. "And because there's less than two hours left to sleep anyway, and because you've got a _light on!_"

"Fine!" he huffed, ripping a sheet of paper from his notebook and shoving it at me. "If you won't go away, you'll just have to study too!"

"Why should I?" I demanded, snatching the paper out of his hand. "I'm _eight years old_, Mello! I don't want to be a genius, or take high school level math, or be number one, or become L! I'm supposed to be in third grade, at a regular school! I'm supposed to eat dinner with my parents and play catch with my dad and go on summer vacations! What the hell's so wrong with just wanting to be _normal_?"

I didn't know what happened – it all had just suddenly spilled out, and before I knew it I was breathing hard and wiping tears from my eyes, and Mello... Mello just stared at me for the longest time, but for once he didn't look angry or mocking or annoyed. Just serious, and maybe a little sad.

"There's nothing wrong with it, Matt," he said at last, "but we're orphans, and we _can't _be normal, not ever. But how many orphans get an opportunity like this? How many kids can lose everything and every_one_, but still have the chance to become someone important, someone _great_?"

"And that's why... that's why you want to be L?" I asked, so quiet it was almost like whispering, wiping my face with the end of my pajama sleeve. He laughed dryly, tucking a bit of perfect blond hair behind his ear.

"What else is there for me? For any of us?"

I stared down at the blank paper he'd given me. I'd crumpled it during my little fit, but I sat it on my leg and smoothed it out as best I could.

"Okay, Mello," I conceded, summoning up the best smile I could for him. "We've got less than three hours left until the test, so we'd better get crackin' if we want to score higher than Near, right?"

He grinned wide and handed (not threw, but actually _handed_) me a pencil, and turned one of his textbooks around for me to see.

Maybe having Mello as a roommate wouldn't be so bad after all.

***

**A/N:** Oi, I was attempting to write as much in an eight-year-old genius voice as possible, since it's in first person. So yes, the run-on sentences were done on purpose, because I was trying to make it sound like a kid's thoughts... Sorry if I failed, I've never been good with children. D:


End file.
